Assignment 5

The symptoms that there is something wrong within the Personnel Records Office (PRO) are:
1) Unclear work responsibility
2) Possessiveness with work
3) Insufficient inter-employee communication
4) Morale problems
5) High turnover
6) Decreasing productivity
The five Job Characteristics are:
1) Skill Variety
2) Task Identity
3) Task Significance
4) Autonomy
5) Feedback from job
Skill variety and task identity appear to have low values in the PRO, as the employees do the same thing
every day, and do not realize how important it is to communicate what they do to others (ie not sharing
files). Task significance is likely a mixed value, as each is possessive of their task and believes it to be
overly important; however, they also do not understand its significance to other parts of the PRO.
Job Enlargement could be used to redesign these jobs by making everyone in the PRO
responsible for an entire record (all five areas). This would increase skill variety and task identity as
people would see the whole picture, do a variety of tasks per employee record, and see how each
employee benefits from a complete record. This would also minimize protectiveness of their area and
the presumption that somehow your task is more significant than others. Lastly, this would require less
inter-employee communication, so poor inter-employee communication is no longer an issue.

Lastly, a discussion on the effectiveness of job rotation program is presented. If the company
introduced a job rotation program, there may be increased skill variety; however, employees may only
do a "good" job when rotated to the area they feel most possessive of. In addition, they may forget how
to do the other areas over time and have to spend a significant portion of their rotation learning the skill
they are supposed to be using. Inputting data requirements can be complex and multi-layered, and
attempting to remember one set after not using these skills for months may result in inconsistent work
quality.